Maurice Béjart

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Maurice Béjart

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Maurice Béjart: 'I pushed something forward in the field of 20th-century dance'

12:01AM GMT 23 Nov 2007

Maurice Béjart , the French choreographer who died yesterday aged 80, was a provocative populist in ballet whose fanatical supporters were equalled by those who believed he was a poseur - among whom much of the British dance establishment could be numbered.

His arena ballets were seen by thousands at a sitting, and he worked with stars of rock and fashion; yet despite nearly half a century of choreographing dozens of ballets, performed from Japan to South America, he was unable to convince Britain and the United States that he was, as he considered himself, one of the handful of giants of 20th-century ballet.

Loved by many great dancers for his warmth and emotional empathy, Maurice Béjart brought to ballet a grandiosity and a pseudo-philosophical intellectualism that attracted as many as it alienated. He maintained that choreography could be compared to political action, but his vagueness about how this could be achieved did not hinder his popularity. He had a genius for tapping into the popular consciousness, hitching an unremarkable and quite conservative choreographic invention to radical abstract music in the 1950s, hippy mysticism in the 1960s, and florid sexuality, popular classical music, high fashion and arena rock in subsequent decades.

His glorification of men, his pop-cultural references and lofty intellectual claims brought his company both global success and - to the surprise of ballet epicureans - a huge new following among young people, attracted by the potent combination of mysticism, camp and sex. Yet inside the bombast, the steps themselves were pale and orthodox ballet steps - a fact noted by the American critic Arlene Croce, who dubbed him "Beige Art". Béjart claimed that, as an experimenter, he was "not ashamed to do lots of bad ballets. There aren't many that are good, and maybe five or six things that are not too bad," he said recently.

All the same, his eagerness to glorify individuals was exciting for classical dancers looking for diversity in their repertoire, and a Who's Who of world ballet knocked at his door asking him to create vehicles for them. Among them were Rudolf Nureyev (Songs of a Wayfarer, 1971), Maya Plisetskaya (Isadora, 1976), Vladimir Vasiliev (Petrouchka, 1977) and Mikhail Baryshnikov (Piano Bar, 1997). For Sylvie Guillem he created Sissi (1992) and Racine cubique (1997), and she became his preferred performer in his signature piece Bolero, a choreography that remains popular to this day, with a boy or girl dancing on a table for an avidly groping audience to Ravel's insistent tune.

The most surprising of Béjart's acolytes was the American ballerina Suzanne Farrell, the star of George Balanchine's New York City Ballet, who had left Balanchine due to his possessiveness in 1970. She distressed the American ballet world even more when she became Béjart's star in Brussels for five years. American critics raised on Balanchine's exquisite abstract ballets were particularly acid about Béjart - "an alien and diseased repertory" was one comment, while another said, "Every time I see the Béjart dancers, they've lost more muscle tone and added more makeup." However, some felt that when Farrell returned to Balanchine in 1975 her dancing had a more personal expressiveness.

A public scandal disagreement erupted between Béjart and Nureyev, whose directorship of the Paris Opera Ballet was disrupted by Béjart. The choreographer's Songs of a Wayfarer had become one of Nureyev's staples as a dancer. However, when he became the Paris Opera Ballet director relations between them became openly stormy. Béjart had resented Nureyev's appointment, believing that, as a Frenchman, a superior choreographer and an outstandingly successful populariser of ballet, he should have been given his country's top ballet job.

When Nureyev invited him to create new ballets in the company, Béjart was considered to have abused his position after a première by attempting to promote to the top rank two young male dancers in whom he was interested. Nureyev was forced to walk on stage in front of the audience and quip "April Fool". A public slanging match erupted in the French press, and Béjart had to back down. However, he continued to lobby to replace Nureyev, his lack of success reinforcing his feeling that he was unappreciated in his own country.

Maurice Béjart was born Maurice Berger on January 1 1927 in Marseilles, the son of the philosopher Gaston Berger. He changed his surname in honour of Armande Béjart, Molière's wife. He studied ballet in Marseille, Paris and London, where he was a student of Vera Volkova, Margot Fonteyn's teacher.

He thought fondly of Britain, telling The Daily Telegraph in a 1993 interview that Britain had saved his country in war and he would be forever grateful. A short, sturdy dancer with fleet footwork, he joined the International Ballet in London in 1949 and danced for a season, impressing with his Bluebird in The Sleeping Beauty. In 1953 he launched a company in Paris starring himself, Les Ballets de l'Etoile, which in 1957 became the Ballet-Théâtre de Paris de Maurice Béjart. A genuine innovator in his way, he choreographed the first ballet made to musique concrète, or noise, Symphonie pour un homme seul, in 1955.

He made his world name in Brussels in 1959 with a creation to Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps for a specially assembled company. Its hordes of atavistic, sexually charged men impressed the Belgians, and they invited him to found the Ballet du XXe siècle in the Théâtre de la Monnaie. There Béjart followed up Sacre with Bolero, a smash hit.

In 1970 he founded the Mudra theatre arts school (named for a Hindu hand movement) in parallel with the Ballet du XXe siècle. In 1987, falling out with Brussels, he moved his company to Lausanne, changing the name to Béjart Ballet Lausanne, with a new school, Rudra, which later had its own company, Compagnie M.

Béjart was exceptionally prolific, producing three or four new ballets a year, for arenas and for theatres. He was always looking for a central figure, and in 1963 Jorge Donn, an exceptionally handsome 17-year-old Argentine, joined the Ballet du XXe siècle, becoming to Béjart what Nijinsky was to Diaghilev - his muse and lover. For Donn Béjart created Nijinsky, clown de Dieu in 1971, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, a Berlioz Romeo and Juliet, Mozart Magic Flute and Schumann Dichterliebe, among others. Donn also starred in several television and feature films about Béjart's work.

Béjart was undaunted by big classical music, and his favourite composer was Wagner; a string of Wagner ballets in the 1960s were capped in 1990 by Ring um den Ring at the Berlin Opera Ballet. Other favourite composers were Mahler (Songs of a Wayfarer and Ce que l'amour me dit) and Pierre Boulez (Le Marteau sans maître and Pli selon pli), and he worked from popular operas such as Mozart's Magic Flute, Verdi's Traviata and Strauss's Salome.

Béjart considered himself a giant in dance, telling The Daily Telegraph: "I pushed something forward in the 20th-century dance field. We were maybe five or six people who helped 20th-century dance to become major."

However Britain was not persuaded. His company performed in Edinburgh Murrayfield Ice Rink in 1962, and regularly played at the Coliseum in the 1970s, when he was dubbed "the Barnum of ballet"; but the public wearied of him. In 2000 he returned with his tribute to Freddie Mercury's Queen, Ballet for Life, which was derisively received, and in 2003 he fared no better with his Mother Teresa ballet, described by The Daily Telegraph as the worst production seen in Britain that year.

His work appeared only once at Covent Garden, when Sylvie Guillem performed his solo La Luna at a Royal Ballet gala in 1991. The Royal Ballet's artistic director Ross Stretton suggested in 2001 that the absence of Béjart was damaging the Royal Ballet's appeal, but the idea was left undeveloped when Stretton resigned soon after.